What’s a girl to do on a four-day prime number birthday weekend? Hopefully some of fun things:

• Spend some time outside. There won’t be sun, but there will be fresh air.
• Take part in a virtual Galentine’s Day romance author event hosted by one of my local bookshops.
• Read! I am enjoying my current book a lot, and I have a bunch more promising titles queued up in the physical TBR pile. We’re expecting an ice storm tomorrow night, which means Rudi might not be able to make it home until Sunday evening.
• Finish a sock.
• Chat with friends and family.
• Watch tv shows and movies I like. If Rudi doesn’t make it home tomorrow night, I’m thinking the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice or Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants may be in order. If he does, I’ve put in a request for the final Lara Jean movie on Netflix. And Sunday night has good PBS shows and Queen Latifah (all of which can be watched a later night if I get to spend the night talking to friends instead).
• Eat pizza for my birthday supper!
• Go to the beach. I’d love to make this happen Monday or Tuesday, but it’s not a trivial adventure and so depends on a number of variables. If it can’t happen, I’m voting for a dvd-and-baked goods marathon.
• Paint my nails.
• Sleep in on a weekday!
• Collect birthday freebies. (There are a surprising number of loyalty programs at local restaurants, ice cream shops, and bakeries I enjoy that offer you free goodies on or around your birthday. I’m absolutely cashing in!)
• Manage expectations. I love birthdays, which sometimes means it can be a bit of a letdown when real life interferes. It’s a pandemic year. Life is hard and different, and comparing Sunday to any other year (or my hopes for an ideal one) will only lead to tears. I will assume that none of the above things will happen and will strive to be grateful if some of them do. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

What’s on tap for your weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A greyhound emerges from a building for a late-night walk wearing a matching jacket and pants. It is way more put together than I am.

2. I am walking down the block behind a man and his dog. Suddenly the dog stops, turns toward a house, and displays significant interest in something in the front yard. I had expected it to be a squirrel, a rat, or a cat in a window. Instead it is a stone statue of a nesting swan on the ledge next to the sidewalk, which the dog jumps at hoping to startle it into flying away.

3. A lawyer’s misadventures with video call filters and his need to clarify his true identity spread across the world like wildfire, providing everyone (except maybe him and his assistant) with some much needed levity.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

I’ve been lazy this past week. (To be fair, I suppose there was also a lot of work, cake baking, and a visit with an old friend. But still… ) Please see last week’s post for the most recent knitting and reading works-in-progress. I’m a little further along in both, but really not enough to bother boring you with a photo.

I have a four-day weekend coming up, though, so I do anticipate having new progress to show you next week.

I broke in my new cookbook, Snacking Cakes by Yossy Arefi, by baking an oatmeal chocolate chip cake tonight.

The cake is tasty, although all the chocolate chips sank to the bottom of the pan. I know how to resolve that with fruit (dredge it in flour), but I don’t know if there’s a similar fix for chocolate. Rudi and I ate nearly half the pan tonight, which the author does warn is a distinct possibility for all the cakes she includes.

While the concept caught my eye, it is the unfussiness of the recipes that made me buy the cookbook on impulse. Each recipe includes what you need to do if you’re using a different type of pan (loaf or sheet), an alternate flavor, and a way to gussy it up (flavored whipped creams, mostly), and most of the recipes are prepped in a single bowl.

I had Rudi pick the inaugural recipe, but since my birthday is coming up this weekend, I think I’ll reserve the next pick. There’s one with pink frosting that’s calling out my name.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to come up with our own topic about Valentine’s Day or love. I’ve opted to go with the top ten books I’ve read with “Love” in the title:

1. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss: A teenager and a senior citizen bond over a book the girl’s mother is translating.
2. Love Is a Mix-Tape by Rob Sheffield: A memoir of Sheffield’s late wife and his grief in losing her, as told through music. Heartbreaking, but even more so because it’s so relatable.
3. Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern: A boy and a girl grow up and grow apart and grow back together again, always brought back together by the power of the letters they send each other.
4. Love That Dog by Sharon Creech: A boy begrudgingly writes a series of poems for a class assignment — and turns it into both a conversation with his teacher and an ode to a beloved pet.
5. My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories, edited by Stephanie Perkins: This collection of romantic holiday-themed short stories written by the hottest YA authors of the time is varied and charming.
6. Book Love by Debbie Tung: A highly relatable collection of comics about being a bibliophile.
7. The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough: Historical fiction about a young woman who wants to fly planes, a wealthy young man with a bright future, and the supernatural characters of Love and Death, whose games have caused all the star-crossed lovers throughout time. The final chapter of this book has been my mind a lot recently.
8. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone: A biography of Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband, William, and the role they played in the advent of cryptology and modern spycraft in the first half of the 20th century.
9. P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han: Really, the whole series of Lara Jean Covey Song novels, about what happens when diaristic love letters you meant to remain private end up in the hands of your crushes.
10. Love & Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch: After her mother dies, a teen learns her mother has asked a strange man who lives in Italy (in a cemetery) to be her guardian. She comes to understand that choice by reading the journal her mother kept during her own teen odyssey to Italy decades earlier.

How about you? Are there Love books you’ve loved?

With apologies to my northern readers, I thought I’d share some of my photos from walking around this weekend, since our snowstorm gave us no accumulation today.

I first saw snowdrops in the week after Christmas. They’re growing in huge clumps around the grounds of the Quaker meetinghouse.

Georgetown continues to be full of winter jasmine.

It was a lovely sunset this evening over the Potomac River. The Georgetown Waterfront Park is one of my favorite urban reclamation projects in D.C. For decades, it was an inaccessible parking lot, used more by tourists than by locals. But for nearly ten years now, it’s routinely been filled with people enjoying the outdoors, including the river stairs where I took these shots.